Lords of Xulima

LordConti

LordConti

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December 22, 2013
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Hi everyone,

I stumbled upon this game by accident, but already played about 30 hours so far and having a blast.
It is already one of my favorite games of the year, second only to D:OS.

It features nice high-res gaphics, an old-school Wizardry style combat system, a comfortable UI and inventory system (that - in my book - puts Wasteland2 and PoE to shame), a good mix of overworld exploration and dungeon crawling, and a pretty good character development system.

Unfortunately, LoX seems to be completely ignored by mainstream media (even the watch and codex don't feature it in their steam lists)? The game is out for a month and there isn't a single professional review to be found.

So, did anyone else play it?
 
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I'm still playing it; it's a VERY long game!!
 
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I'm currently on it. Dunno how it ends, I just passed some emitting dark Yul statue, party levels cca 25.

Said elsewhere. Starts impressively. Challenging and interesting.
But very soon it turns into a chore. Yesterday all I did was fight after fight against invisible mobs. And I just don't want to play Final Fantasies.
Mediocre game. I'm it's backer on Kickstarter, sadly, I suggest buying it only if you don't have anything else to play - and you do have at least Risen 3 to check out.

Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it turns into something better soon, but I doubt it.
 
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Definitely one of my favorite games of the year, and one of the few I've finished. There were times when fights could get tedious, but I didn't have any issues with random monsters, you can just avoid them all with the camouflage skill.
 
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I think I beta-tested this for a couple hundred hours. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but am a little burned out to play the release version. I bt'd Divinity too and I'm just now playing the full game due to burnout.
 
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fadedc said:
I didn't have any issues with random monsters, you can just avoid them all with the camouflage skill.
Click to expand...
I just can't play the game like that. Can't.
I want to finish every possible quest and you can't finish The Ruined Garden if you'll avoid those invisibles.
And it's not just XP and cash you're missing. Just as example, the final mob that appears in The Muddy Lake is Emerald Wyvern. Tough nut to crack, sure, but drops +1 STR permanent egg!
Didn't use it yet as I dunno if it's a part of a quest.

pic.jpg


See my pain? The game started as a challenge. But it's stops being a challenge for a completionist pretty soon. It's probably a challenge just for people who don't want questing but instead game Need for Speed.

Don't get me wrong, while the amount of invisible mobs is something IMO highly negative and should be lowered to just a few mobs max per area, the game has very nice puzzles. And I'm enjoying lockpick minigame. Plain love it. Crappy traps F5/F8 abuse, chests and doors, no cheating as this is fun!

Oh and… Cursed hounds you can't avoid.
Also, no matter how many areas you clear, bloody thieves are being respawned more frequently than trashmobs in DA3! A design crime there, a design crime here.
 
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The ruined garden you have to clear to complete that one quest, that's true. But there are only a few encounters there and it's pretty much the exception to the rule.

Emerald wyverns are in lots of places and it's not the "last" creature in the lake, it's just one possible encounter. It could just as easily be your first creature.

Hounds are encountered pretty rarely and there is actually a way to stop them from spawning.

But overall my point still stands. If you don't want random encounters, don't choose to fight them. If you do, you only have yourself to blame.
 
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Dunno if it's random, in all cases the last mob I get while clearing an area is the hardest one. Maybe my game got bugged?

I don't have myself to blame. I blame - devs. If these things were supposed to be skipped, why are they there in the first place?
In any case. You play by skipping and love the game. I'm turning every single possible stone in the game just as I do in all games, and I'm annoyed with the Final Fantasy invisible mobs on the map design and say it's fail. Totally.
Not the whole game. The game is okay. Well… Not everything, again… But this invisible ambushes part definetly sux.

I'll sum it up in "finished" thread. When I'm finished. Right now it looks as 5-6. Dunno what happens next in the game. Maybe it goes even worse, maybe it gets no rediculous number of trashmobs, less quantity, more quality. We'll see.
 
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I completed every side quest when I finished the game and explored every corner of the map so I was hardly skipping. I just chose not to fight every random encounter. They are there so that people who enjoy them (or need loot/xp) can fight them, and people who don't enjoy them can skip them. If you don't enjoy them but are choosing to fight them anyway, then again that's your issue, not the developer's issue. I understand you may have a quirk that forces you to do things you don't enjoy. Everyone has their own things that they deal with. But the designers can't adjust their game to accommodate every player with an unusual compulsion. Expecting them to take out optional content just because you feel compelled to complete it is not reasonable.
 
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The random encounters are finite anyways, right? It's not like a JRPG where there's a unlimited supply of random mobs, and once you kill the last one that section is clear forever.
 
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JDR13 said:
The random encounters are finite anyways, right? It's not like a JRPG where there's a unlimited supply of random mobs, and once you kill the last one that section is clear forever.
Click to expand...

They are infinite but they don't pop-up often and they can easily be dodged.In average I think I fought 3-4 random encounters per map.You can easily dodge 100% of them if you rest or drink pots to restore power points(mana).
 
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Pladio said:
No, they are finite (or at least up to where I got).

As long as your button is orange, it means then can come back. When you clear an area the button goes grey and you get extra xp for having cleared the area.
Click to expand...

Ok now I feel stupid, I beaten game and I haven't figured that out:(.
 
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JDR13 said:
The random encounters are finite anyways, right? It's not like a JRPG where there's a unlimited supply of random mobs, and once you kill the last one that section is clear forever.
Click to expand...

I can't answer this question.
Invisible area mobs are finite. There's about 30 of such mobgroups total in an area.
Visible mobs are also finite. Since this is Final Fantasy, unually there are max 3 visible mobgroups in an area. And in some areas just 1.

The variety of invisible mobs is like… You fight 28 same groups of rats, one group of dinosaurs to get to the last invisible mob that drops an useable goodie.

It's unclear if bees groups on paths, thieves, some goblinlike mobs and cursed hounds are finite. As they jump on you no matter where you are.

I'm calling it quantity over quality and sorry, but if someone can't understand why I'm saying this game is mediocre, that isn't my problem really. If it matters, I was KS backer. I'm not sorry for that, I would back it again, we need RPGs. But next time, I'll ask if there are thousands of invisible mobs and will not back 16th Final Fantasy.
Xulima, in my case, simply doesn't deliver and while it's not an utter fail, it's hard to find anything above average in it (hard, but not impossible).
 
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I always felt like there were some areas that had infinite random encounters, but then I was never crazy enough to fight through 30+ of them to see if there was an end. Other areas ran out of random encounters extremely quickly. It felt like when you walked through an area where the name and description changes when you entered (ie it told you that you were entering the forest of fear) then that meant you could clear the zone. If they were just overland encounters outside of a special zone I think those were infinite. I suspect they wanted to leave some grinding options in the game in case players got stuck. Plus it was sometimes handy to wipe out a few of those bandit groups to refresh my rogue's shuriken supplies.

Towards the end game I can't imagine not using the camo skill to avoid at least some random fights. The difficulty really spikes, and it's clearly intended to be a resource that you use to get through dungeons.
 
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The random encounters get really old really fast. It's my only real beaf with the game. Otherwise I love it. I wish there was a mod where you could turn them off or reduce them dramatically. Maybe some kind of adjustment for XP would have to be made but still, it would make the game so much better.
 
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